by Bob Barr | May 17, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Last week, the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee publicly outlined a series of financial transactions possibly implicating various Biden family members in corrupt financial dealings involving millions of dollars. What the American public does not realize is that the information uncovered and made public by the committee, came primarily from what are known as Suspicious Activity Reports or “SARs.” These reports are secret and are routinely filed against private citizens by banks and other financial entities (including casinos and mortgage brokers) as mandated by federal law. The grounds on which each SAR is filed can be for something as significant as a large international wire transfer, or as mundane as a deposit of a cashier’s check or cash by a bank customer who just sold an automobile and simply wants to place the money in their account. The bank customer will almost never know that such a report has been filed with Uncle Sam, because under the 1970 law that created SARs the financial institution is prohibited from informing the customer. SARs forms have been modified over the past half century, but still require all employees of financial institutions to file a report whenever they consider that a customer’s transaction has “raised suspicion.” While neither the SAR itself nor the SAR Instructions explain in detail what constitutes a legal basis on which to conclude that a customer’s activity is sufficiently “suspicious” to warrant filing a SAR, the sweep of the law is extremely broad. Federal law requires, for example, that any transaction of $5,000 or more must be reported via a SAR whenever the bank employee concludes it “has no business or apparent...
by Bob Barr | May 11, 2023 | Townhall Article |
Townhall “Gaslight” — psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator –Merriam-Webster Dictionary Neither history nor common sense mean anything to those demanding “racial reparations.” Slavery in America was definitively outlawed upon ratification of the 13th Amendment to our Constitution in 1865. The right to vote was secured against racial discrimination by way of the 15th Amendment just five years later. Federal legislation, including the 1871 criminal deprivation of civil rights law, the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and many other statutes, provide robust legal vehicles by which to ensure the principles embodied in the Constitution had real meaning, and were enforceable in courts of law. Judging by the way the “racial reparations” movement is gaining steam in California, none of these several constitutional and statutory mechanisms ever really existed. Reparations proponents are attempting to gaslight the American people into believing our country sleepwalked through those eras and never addressed the evils of slavery or racial discrimination. That this reparations movement is gaining notoriety mostly in California, which still ironically claims the moniker of “the Golden State,” should not surprise us. One of the state’s former chief executive, Jerry Brown, was known as “Governor Moonbeam” for his eccentricities and “hippy” image during his first two terms, from 1975 to 1983. However, the fact that the state’s current governor, Gavin Newsom (who sees a...
by Bob Barr | May 9, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In 1989, the mega-band Queen sang, “I want it all, and I want it now” – a refrain that perfectly captures the latest budget request sent to the Congress by Lina Khan, President Biden’s top regulator at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The request, sent just last month, seeks a whopping 37% budget increase for the coming 2024 fiscal year. The $160 million increase over last year’s budget is undeserved and unjustified, and should be swiftly deep-sixed by Congress. The FTC Chair, long a critic of big businesses, disingenuously recited in her budget request cover letter that the additional taxpayer money was needed so the regulatory agency could “continue to meet the ongoing challenges of its mission to protect consumers and promote competition.” In fact, the FTC under Biden has been moving in the exact opposite direction. This was made clear recently when the Commission’s leadership moved away from four decades of operating by legal consensus and rescinded an existing, fundamental policy statement that had affirmed the “consumer welfare standard” as the litmus test for whether federal action against companies is or is not warranted. As noted recently by former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, the consumer welfare standard has been the “guiding principle” of federal antitrust policy for more than 40 years, reflecting the view that the government should intervene in the marketplace only if the consumer is being harmed. The American people got a firsthand look into the FTC’s new operational standards recently, when the commission appeared to target Elon Musk for disclosing how Twitter’s former leadership colluded with Uncle Sam to restrict and censor Americans’ speech. The Commission issued Musk a subpoena to divulge his communications with...
by Bob Barr | May 4, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Calls for a national police force — a concept deeply in conflict with our very form of constitutional governance — are becoming, if not commonplace, more troublingly recurrent. Of particular concern is the idea that America needs such a force not to defend against widespread lawlessness, but rather to defend against the ideology reflected in what the Left describes as “MAGA.” The real target of this movement is in fact political conservatism. A recent essay by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson published on April 21st as a “Big Idea” in Politico, strongly suggests such a move. The main title of the piece, “The Threat of Civil Breakdown Is Real,” might appear to the reader who reads no further, as a timely warning against rioting and other mass lawlessness our country has suffered in recent years, including the George Floyd-inspired riots that rocked major cities in 2020. Not so. The subtitle of the Politico essay —“National security officials are still not prepared for a far-right revolt” — makes clear the authors are worried solely about “right-wing” violence. They make no mention, much less express concern about violence-prone groups such as Antifa, Black Lives Matters, or the eco-terrorists opposing construction of a police training center in Atlanta, Georgia. On the other hand, the “Big Idea” is replete with what the authors perceive as the real threats our country faces: “hyperbolic reactions of far-right Republican figures and media commentators”“bellicose conservative agendas”“white supremacist groups”“far-right groups” generally“the MAGA movement”“Radicalized Republicans”“high-powered weapons like the AR-15s” and, of course, “Trump” and “Trumpism” The authors of this call to action lament that the United States, “unlike the United Kingdom … has no...
by Bob Barr | May 4, 2023 | Townhall Article |
Townhall From the east coast to the Pacific Northwest, the past week once again confirmed that Democrat political leaders prefer to address the serious problem of gun crime in America as a political rather than a law enforcement and mental health problem. In Washington state, Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law outlawing the sale of AR-style rifles. Inslee wrongly but sanctimoniously stated that such “weapons of war” have as their “only purpose” murdering people. Conveniently ignored by the Governor is the fact that the AR is the most popular rifle in the country, used regularly by millions of law-abiding citizens for competition, hunting, and self-defense. In the nearby, and also Democrat-led state of Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis lamented that he was not yet legislatively empowered to outlaw the same rifle, but pompously declared that by forcing citizens in the state to wait three days before being permitted to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to purchase a firearm, he was making it “safe” for them to go to the grocery store. Last week also, on Capitol Hill testimony by the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) made clear that today’s ATF remains more concerned with finding ways to limit the lawful ownership of firearms and accessories, than in meeting its avowed mission “to protect communities from violent criminals, criminal organizations, [and] acts of terrorism.” For example, during his April 26th appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, ATF Director Steve Dettlebach was asked how the agency intended in the future to enforce the agency’s new, self-dictated regulation on so-called arm or “stabilizing” braces, which as of May 31st will become...
